[.ca] The Ulitmate Cheesecake Cookbook (ISBN 031227128X)

From Amazon.com:
If your ultimate cheesecake is rich and creamy, heavy with cream cheese, and best eaten in slivers, look no further. Joey Reynolds, syndicated talk-show host, and Myra Chanin, cookbook author and food writer, have teamed up to deliver the mother lode of cheesecake recipes. Although there are dozens and dozens of recipes in this book, they are all variations of two basic ones--baked and nonbaked. With flavors as interesting as Cranberry Mint Cheesecake, Apricot Streusel Cheesecake, White Cassis Cheesecake, and Honey Fig Cheesecake, you'll use this book as much for ideas as you will for the recipes. Reynolds and Chanin love flavorings and extracts, and they begin by recommending their favorite producers and then use almost every flavor made by them. With the "Bonus" Magic Formula Which Will Allow You to Experiment and Concoct Your Own Personally Flavored Baked Cheesecake, you can add any of the flavors they haven't already, and you'll never have to make the same flavor twice. Reynolds and Chanin are imaginative and are sure to get your creative juices flowing with decadences such as Southern Peach Cheesecake, made with peach extract and preserves, coconut flakes, and chopped pecans, and crowd-pleasers such as Jamoca Cheesecake, made with instant espresso, coffee-flavored liqueur, chocolate, and walnuts. These are not the flat-topped, custardlike cheesecakes that belong on fine-dining dessert carts, but rather the rich, dense, lightly browned New York-style cheesecakes that gave the dessert its American-icon status. Don't worry about the cracks, Reynolds and Chanin reassure us--the baked sour-cream topping is the perfect foil. With 23 tips to encourage us, such as Think Positive, Use Plastic-Wrap Mittens to Press Down the Crumb-Crust Mix Around the Pan, and Never Bake Cheesecakes at the Last Minute, novice bakers should feel confident and will be amused by the authors' lighthearted tones. The second master recipe is The Magic Formula Which Will Allow You to Experiment and Concoct Your Own Personally Flavored Nonbaked Cheesecake. It comes at the end of a chapter of recipes for nonbaked cheesecakes such as Holiday Ginger Pumpkin Cheesecake, Banana-Split Cheesecake, and Caramel Nut Cheesecake. These nonbaked cheesecakes call for sweetened condensed milk and an acidic fruit juice, which makes them to set up the way Key Lime Pie is set. They also contain a "fruit protector" (ascorbic acid and corn sugar) called Fruit Fresh. The final section of the book is "Other People's Cheesecakes," and it serves to remind us that even if you already have our own favorite cheesecake recipes and techniques, you can never have too many. --Leora Y. Bloom

A good buy, but definitely far from being the ULTIMATE:
I had high hopes when I bought this cookbook simply because it bills itself as THE ultimate cheesecake cookbook. Heck, I bought it without even browsing through it! It's easy enough to read: directions on how to make a perfect cheesecake, pointers to remember, etc. There are also sections for baked, non-baked and other people's favorite cheesecakes. The book's drawback is that it has NO PICTURES - not one (save for the one on the cover). For a cookbook especially, pictures are what urge and inspire the reader to try the recipe. Secondly, the recipes for the no-bake cheesecakes are (almost) the same as the baked ones. No fair! Do buy this book if you're just starting to make cheesecakes -the book will be a good guide. But if you're familiar with making cheesecakes, this book will only bore you with its lack of variety.

Only for those who know how to bake:
I listen to Joey Reynolds radio show out of Fresno (we live in the Sierras up north) and have heard him talk about cheescakse for months. And my family likes cheesecake, especially tofu and other lower fat types. Like Reviewer Lori Baltazar from Manila, Philippines it is surprising that a cook book lacks photos of what an item might at least look like. Thus this isn't a cheesecake cookbook that I would recommend for anyone other than a cook who knows their way around a kitchen and has some major self confidence and has made cheescakes from other recipes from other books.

Cheescake Rookie:
I love to make desserts, especially cheesecake but before I bought this book I had only attempted 1. Now I can't stop making them. I thought the book provides good directions and has a lot of helpful hints on the right and wrong of cheescake making. The only negative is that there are only so many recipes and those are limited. But on the flip side I think this book provides a good foundation for branching out to try your own recipes.